STAGE: The Play That Goes Wrong

Sometimes we go to the theatre to be moved, inspired, or challenged, but sometimes we just go to be entertained and have a good hearty laugh. The Play That Goes Wrong, now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre, delivers the latter in spades. We laughed heartily and non-stop. This play is about an earnest but hapless college drama society attempting to stage a murder mystery play, and “Murder at Haversham Manor” (the play within the play) is as brilliant a drama as Fawlty Towers is a hotel. The mayhem begins even before the play officially begins, with last minute set repairs laid bare, and “production staff” roving the audience in search of last minute props and a lost dog, and even drawing an audience member or two into the gags as semi-witting participants. Every conceivable angle of “so bad it’s good” acting is mined, along with every form of actor’s nightmares, from forgotten lines, missing props, missed cues, dialog loops, and set malfunctions. Despite a cavalcade of mishaps, the unstoppable actors rally to their hilarious conclusion. The prowess of the actual actors in executing such extraordinary timing and physical comedy feats is impressive, rivaled only by the stage set itself which is an amazing piece of comic machinery. Not since Noises Off has a watching a play go wrong been such good fun.

FILM: Straight Up

Writer-director-actor James Sweeney’s first feature film, Straight Up, made a good impression at OutFest last night. The protagonist Todd is endearingly neurotic and OCD, and after having calculated the improbability of his finding the perfect man (his own gay romance version of the Drake equation), wonders if he should make a go at having a relationship with Rory, an aspiring actress with a wit and baggage that matches his. It seems they’re three-quarters ideal for each other, but can they round it up? The dialog is rapid-fire clever, heady and hilarious, and there may never have been more sparks between two people who didn’t feel that spark (at least not since Cat On a Hot Tin Roof). The backdrop for this is the Los Angeles populated by waiter-actor-model-serial-housesitters and the occasional software engineer. The film manages to be simultaneously earnest and irreverent about romance, about LA, and about rom-coms (whose tropes it enacts while parodying). Sweeney and Katie Findlay (Rory) remind me of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in their best years (if one may be permitted to recall Woody Allen before he was creepy), and other notable actors just add to the party, like Tracie Thoms as Sweeney’s deadpan therapist. Fresh, original, and a delight from beginning to end.

FILM: The Farewell

Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is a story not just about the distinctly Chinese way that one family faced the end of life of a beloved grandmother, but the conflicting values and sensibilities that lie in the hyphen of a Chinese-American immigrant family. As the movie opens, we are told that it is “based on an actual lie”. When the grandmother is diagnosed with late terminal cancer, the family decides it is best not to tell her, and then concocts an excuse around a hastened wedding so that the globally scattered family can all be together again, and to say their goodbyes to “Nai Nai” (Chinese for grandma) while trying not to cry or to say goodbye out loud. The situation is fraught and funny enough on its own, and Wang’s portrayal is appropriately restrained. She neither plays up comedy (though there are some funny moments), nor manipulates for tears, and doesn’t flinch from the awkward moments (like some painfully unjoyful wedding toasts). Neither does she flinch from subtitles, which only enhance the film, not only be being more authentic, but by underscoring that some characters speak English and some don’t, and how that is used at times to talk around someone in their presence. The film turns on watching this emotional charade play out, and on watching granddaughter Billi, who moved to America when she was six, struggle with the rest of her family over whether this “good lie” is a good idea. This performance is a whole new level in Awkwafina’s rising career, complemented by Diana Lin as Billy’s mother, who keeps her emotions below the surface, and Shuzhen Zhou who is a radiant Nai Nai. There is so much in this film that seems so authentic, it reminded me so much of a Chinese friend’s family whom I got to know on a trip to Asia. There are small moments in the film that are especially touching – the scene of the family visiting the grandfather’s grave; Billy looking suddenly bereft and nostalgic out of a taxi’s rear window when she recognizes a glimpse of a childhood landmark surrounded by new development that obliterated where her old neighborhood once was. And I love the film’s opening scene. Billi is on the phone with her Nai Nai, in a way that makes clear they talk often. “What’s that noise in the background? Nai Nai, where are you?” “It’s nothing, it’s just the neighbor.” (She’s in a hospital waiting room.) “It’s so cold in New York. Are you wearing a hat?” “Yes, Nai Nai.” (She’s not.) In the first few minutes, we already see the small lies that can be part of loving family relationships.

FOOD: Anniversary tasting menu dinner at Auburn

Auburn is a new tasting menu restaurant, recently opened in the space on Melrose that used to be Hatfield’s and the legendary Citrus before that, giving it much to live up to. But with good buzz, I thought it would be a fitting place for an anniversary dinner. The space harkens Citrus in its balance of stylish refinement and California patio casual. Done in modernist Scandinavian tones (light wood and glass), the main dining room has an open skylight in the center with an acacia tree and live greenery, and other skylights keep the room bathed in beautiful natural light. The kitchen is wide open so you can see the woodfire stove in one corner and you can watch the bustling team of molecular gastronomists not only cooking the food but arranging it artistically so that every dish is perfectly Instagrammable. (George noticed that their aprons had little breast pockets for three different sizes of tweezers.) Rather than completely dictate your meal, as tasting menus usually do, Auburn lets you chart your own course by offering twelve dishes on any given day and letting you choose your own way through four, six, or nine courses from the twelve on offer. We opted for the six-course, which felt about right (and ended up being an enjoyable 3.5 hour dinner). Of course there are wine pairings, with a curated option or a more adventurous private sommelier consultation option. We just went for the curated option, which was a plenty interesting array of wines thoughtfully chosen to pair with each course.

We began the meal with two amuses bouches. One was a tiny corn tartelette in a little buckwheat crust (or a gluten-free lettuce wrap for George) topped with microgreens and tiny flowers. The other was essentially chicharrones (cracklings) made from pork rind sliced very thin so that they came out crispy but light and delicate. Bread arrived shortly after, a beautiful artisanal sourdough small round for me and gluten-free bread specially made by the pastry chef for George, along with a delicious avocado butter with a tart pool of minced shiso in oil. Our first wine came, a crisp minerally vinho verde which conjured a memory of a seaside cliff top in Portugal where we dined on freshly caught fish. Vinho verde is a lovely fish wine, but here it was complementing our first cold starter, a bowl of julienne curls of cucumber and nectarine with oxalis leaves, wetted with verbena kombucha, and with lightly set curds. The mild tartness of the curds set off the cool freshness of the cucumber. Our second wine was a white garnacha with a fruity floral nose from the bit of viognier blended in. Our second course was a cold stone bowl holding delicate hiramasa crudo with thin slices of purple radish, mulberries, and tiny sprigs of citrus fern, swimming in a pool of bright green cold celery broth. After the fish was gone, I spooned up every drop of that celery broth. On the third course we diverged. George took another cold dish, Brandywine tomatoes and Santa Barbara box crab meat with nasturtium leaves and a seaweed lemon granita, paired with a getariako txakolina, a lightly effervescent wine with green apple notes from the Basque coast near San Sebastian. Meanwhile I moved on to warm dishes. Black cod fresh from the Channel Islands was cooked in brown butter, giving it a light butter-browned crust, served in a sauce made from butter and stock of the fish bones smoked over embers, topped with watercress microgreens, matched with a chardonnay from Chablis with round acid and fruit. I was glad to have a hunk of bread to soak up every last bit of that sauce. For our fourth courses, George had the cod while I took a succulent koji-aged Liberty duck breast with large grilled cherries, their sweetness offset by mustard seeds and a bed of mustard greens, nicely complemented by a Langhe Nebbiolo with its own cherry notes. For our fifth, we diverged again. George took a dry-aged ribeye steak, plated in a rich dark pool with morel mushrooms, kombu, and Australian black truffle, with a glass of deep fruity reserva rioja. Me, I was intrigued by a savory cheese course: Époisses, a very soft and pungent cheese from Burgundy, was warmed a poured over roasted sunchokes, a brilliant pairing further enhanced with a microplane shower of black truffle. Sunchoke, like artichoke, can be a challenge for wine pairing, notwithstanding pungent cheese and truffles, but this was beautifully solved with an Arbois vin jaune, an unusual wine from the Jura mountains between Burgundy and the Swiss border, matured under a yeast film, giving it its distinctive amber color and a flavor like a dry fino sherry. We converged for our last course, a dessert with some unexpected savory elements that worked well: a dollop of fresh tart yogurt in a shallow pool of dark caramel, the syrup deglazed with mushroom stock and a splash of pernod, and garnished with tiny delicate candied fennel fronds. With this, we imbibed a ratafia champenois, a fortified wine made from Champagne must, with raisiny notes that complemented the mushroom caramel nicely. Finally, as I sipped an espresso, we were brought mignardises of little candied rhubarb batons with tiny yellow flower petals to close our grand celebratory meal.

ART: Allure of Matter: Material Art From China @ LACMA

The new exhibition at LACMA “The Allure of Matter: Material Art From China” showcases a wealth of creativity from Chinese artists working in a variety of materials from porcelain and wood to tobacco, ash, and human hair. It seems audacious to try to make a sculpture of a spreading fire, but that’s what Liu Jianhua has done in “Black Flame”, working in porcelain to make eight thousand black “tongues” of flame of varying height placed around the floor of the first gallery I entered as if the room were on fire. Crossing the room with these black flames on both sides reminded me of the videos of people last summer fleeing Paradise, California with flames on both sides of the road. On one wall of this room were three large white rectangles entitled “Blank Paper”, which looked like just that except that they too were made of porcelain. These two works filled the room, in an interesting conversation between black and white, dynamic and static, timeless and fleeting. The center of another large room was mostly occupied with a very large orange-and-white “tiger skin” shag rug, though when I approached, I did a double-take to realize that artist Xu Bing had created this “rug” from carefully arranging thousands of cigarettes. “1st Class” not only creates a fascinating play of color as you look at it from different angles, seeing alternately the white and orange cigarette paper or the darker tobacco seen from “head on”, but it also suggests a conceptual play of consumerism (a mansion-size rug nominally made of possibly endangered animal pelts) as a carcinogen. A couple of other works by Xu also feature tobacoo, including a traditional Chinese scroll painting of a village and river, with a single forty-foot long cigarette running down the middle of it with the end having burnt and stained the painting. Chen Zhen, an artist battling cancer, perhaps inspired by chemotherapy or ancient Chinese medicine, crafted some beautiful crystal sculptures that turned out to be internal organs, an anatomy textbook rendered in sparkling transparent crystal. Song Dong’s “Traceless Stele”, a blank metallic slab monument equipped with water and paintbrushes invites its viewers to engage with it, dipping the paintbrushes into water and drawing or writing inscriptions on the monument which last only a moment before the water evaporates, as you contemplate the nature of temporal existence. One artist has collected human hair from all over the world to weave it into a flag symbolizing multi-cultural harmony, while another artist has collected ash from burnt incense in a temple and painstakingly sorted it by color and coarseness in order to create “paintings” on canvas from it. Yet another artist collected roof tiles from traditional homes that were being demolished in Beijing, and attached to each a black and white photo of a scene from the site where each tile was collected, to create a kind of concrete quilt memorializing neighborhoods that no longer exist. Some of these works could be understood just by looking at them, while others were more conceptual, requiring reading the description to understand the significance of the materials and the process. So many of them were fascinating. I found myself raptly engaged in several of them, and revisited a few. (As so often, a hat tip to KCRW's Edward Goldman for the recommendation.)

July 4th, 2019

On the eve of our nation’s 243rd birthday, I think about what America represents to the world, as a nation uniquely founded on a set of Enlightenment ideas governed by a Constitution, not embedded in tribalism and traditional authority. It has been a shared commitment to those ideals that has bound us together through our relatively brief history. We have no common ethnicity nor national religion, so it is only those ideals and the struggle to live up to them that binds us together as an American people. Our founders understood that they themselves fell short of fully living up to the ideals they proclaimed, but had faith that the shared commitment to those ideals would call upon the better natures of its citizens to make the union “more perfect”. We began as a nation of slaveholders and slavery-enablers, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and went forward from there. We enshrined freedom of speech and of the press in our First Amendment, then one of our first administrations outlawed published criticism of the government, and even as recently as WWI our Supreme Court would endorse criminalization of expressions of anti-war opinion. We prohibited racial discrimination in the hard-won Fourteenth Amendment, but then discriminated by race as we interned Japanese-Americans during WWII. We put up the Statue of Liberty “lifting her lamp beside the golden door”, but then slammed that door shut on Chinese immigrants, and then on southern and eastern Europeans, and then we turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. We seem to be a nation who proclaims ideals but then takes a good while to catch up in actual practice. That “shining city on a hill” we like to tout is not where we live yet, but it’s a glossy brochure of what we hope to build. We do seem to make slow progress when enough eyes focus on the shared vision. So when I look around today and despair how far short we still fall from our ideals, how far we are from the summit of that shining city, it is useful perspective to turn around and see where we started, and how far we have come. May the ideals that have sustained us so far continue to call us onward and upward. Happy birthday, America!